25 March 2005, Friday

There was this guy, dubbed Prince Monolulu in the early 20th Century London, who, among his numerous other activities, was taking what was like a week’s work payment for predicting the gender of a baby with money back guarantee. It was all very impressive, he’d write the prediction, wax-seal it in an envelope and make the scamee sign over the seal.

The fun was, of course, when the most naive part of the unfortunate half of his customers (the others just got real and kept silent about getting scammed) went back to his “office” for refund, only to discover that the sealed and signed by their own hand envelope indeed contained the correct prediction, if you please, sirrah!

The reason for this misunderstanding must surely be that the fortunate parrents have forgotten the prediction, and not that the Prince has put in writing the exact opposite of his verbal prediction…

A slightly modified version of this scam, boosted with some (unbiquitous nowadays) massmailing campain, is the stock-market prediction scam, see for example here.

And what would a post about scams do without the broad topic of the Nigerian scam. If you’ve lived in a cave for the last 5 years, go create a free mail account and you’ll understand what it’s all about. Here’s a lengthy, but happy-ending story about a Nigerian scam that went wrong (for the scammer).